What Kind of Creatures Are We?

193 Pages·2015·0.44 MB·English

by  Noam Chomsky

WHAT KIND OF CREATURES ARE WE?
columbia themes in philosophy
columbia themes in philosophy
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Akeel Bilgami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Columbia Themes in Philosophy is a new series with a broad and accomodating thematic
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Michael Dummet, Truth and the Past
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Michael Dummet, The Nature and Future of Philosophy
Jean Bricmont and Julie Franck, eds., Chomsky Notebook
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Alan Montefi ore, A Philosophical retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity
Thom Brooks and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Rawl’s Political Liberalsim
What Kind of CREATURES Are We?
n o a m c h o m s k y
Columbia University Press new york
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Copyright © 2016 Noam Chomsky
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chomsky, Noam, author.
What kind of creatures are we? / Noam Chomsky.
pages cm. — (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-231-17596-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-231-54092-6 (e-book)
1. Language and languages—Philosophy. I. Title.
p106.c46 2016
401—dc23
2015021707
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
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since the manuscript was prepared.
CONTENTS
foreword vii
1 | what is language? 1
2 | what can we understand? 27
3 | what is the common good? 59
4 | the mysteries of nature:
how deeply hidden? 81
notes 129
index 147

FOREWORD
Akeel Bilgrami
t his book presents a lifetime of refl ection by a scientist
of language on the broader implications of his scientifi c work.
The title of this volume, W hat Kind of Creatures Are W e? , con-
veys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They
cover an impressive range of fi elds: theoretical linguistics,
cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science,
evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge,
the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political phi-
losophy, and, even briefl y, the ideal of human education.
Chapter 1 presents, with clarity and precision, Noam
Chomsky’ own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cogni-
tive science (both fi elds in which he has played an absolutely
central founding role), recording the progress achieved over
the years but recording much more strenuously how tenta-
tively those claims to progress must be made and how a very
large amount of work remains to be done even in the most
fundamental areas of study. Changes of mind over these years
are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred
only in the past decade or so.
The chapter begins by motivating the question its title an-
nounces, “What Is Language?” It behooves us to ask it because
without being clear about what language is, not only will we
not get the right answers to other questions about various spe-
cifi c aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame
those specifi c questions), but we will not get close to investi-
gating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis
and evolutionary origins of language.
A tradition that goes back to Galileo and Descartes recog-
nized the most fundamental feature of language, which then
viii got its most explicit articulation in Humboldt: “Language is
quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly bound-
less domain, the essence of all that can be thought. It must
D
R therefore make infi nite employment of fi nite means, and is
O
W able to do so, through the power which produces identity of
E
R language and thought.”1 Darwin, too, is cited as repeating
O
F
this in a more elementary form in the context of evolution-
ary concerns about language: “The lower animals diff er from
man solely in his almost infi nitely larger power of associating
together the most diversifi ed sounds and ideas.” It is worth
noting that there are three fundamental features observed
here by Humboldt and Darwin. First, the claim to an infi nite
power residing in a fi nite base; second, the link of ideas with
sound; and third, the link of language with thought. All of them
are gathered in what Chomsky declares at the outset as the
Basic Property of language: “[E]ach language provides an un-
bounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that
receive interpretations at two interfaces, sensorimotor for
externalization and conceptual-intentional for mental pro-
cesses.” The hierarchical-structural element speaks to the
fi rst feature; the sensorimotor interface, to the second feature;
and the conceptual-intentional interface, to the third feature.
What will account for this Basic Property is a computa-
tional procedure. The philosophical signifi cance of this is two-
fold: a theory of language is necessarily a generative grammar,
and the theory is necessarily about an object that individual
human beings possess, internal to the individual subject and
its mentality (i.e., intensional elements). It is not a theory
about externalized utterances, nor is it, therefore, about a
social phenomenon. The nomenclature to capture this latter
distinction between what is individual/internal/intensional ix
and what is externalized/social is I-language and E-language
respectively. It is I-languages that alone can be the object of
D
scientifi c study, not E-languages. 2 And although such study is R
O
eventually to be redeemed in a biological account, until that W
E
eventuality the science captures the phenomena at a level of R
O
F
abstraction from the biology and speaks at the cognitive level
of the computational power that satisfi es the Basic Property. 3
A diff erent, more general, task is to discover the shared
underlying features of all I-languages, which is determined
again by the biological properties with which human beings
are endowed (a theme whose wider signifi cance for cognition
in general is discussed again in chapter 2). This more general
task is undertaken with a view to discovering the biological en-
dowment that determines what generative systems can serve
as I-languages. In other words, what are the possible human
languages?
Chomsky then points out that as soon as the study of gen-
erative grammars addressing the Basic Property of language
was seriously undertaken, some surprising puzzles emerged,
with far-reaching implications. One is the “structure depen-
dence” of linguistic operations: in all constructions, in all
languages, these operations invariably rely on structural dis-
tance rather than on the computationally far simpler notion
of linear distance. Language learners know this automatically,
without instruction. There is support for this from evidence
from experimental neuroscience and psychology. The result
follows from the assumption that the order is simply not avail-
able to the operations that generate the structured expres-
sions that are interpreted at the conceptual-intentional in-
x terface, for thought and organization of action. That follows,
in turn, from the very natural assumption that I-languages are
generative systems based on the most elementary computa-
D
R tional operation, which is order-free. These and numerous
O
W other considerations provide substantial evidence that linear
E
R order is ancillary to language, not involved in core syntax and
O
F
semantics. The same is true of the various external arrange-
ments of sign language, which is now known to be remarkably
like spoken language in its structure, acquisition, use, and even
neural representation. Presumably, these external properties
refl ect conditions imposed by the sensorimotor system. The
option of using linear order does not even arise for the lan-
guage learner. Linear order and other arrangements are rel-
evant to what is heard—that is, externalized—not to what is
thought, which is interior.
He then points out that these conclusions accord well with
the little that is known about the origin of language. The sen-
sorimotor system “appear[s] to have been in place long before
language emerged,” and there seems to be little specifi c adap-
tation for language. Cognitive properties of far deeper kinds
than those possessed by apes, or presumably nonhuman homi-
nins, are intrinsic to language. Apes have gestural systems ad-